If your ass is not making it to the session on time at 2 pm like we agreed on multiple times in a row, I will not trust you to be on time for an event.
If you are making absurd demands of the DM and try to bully them to include your overpowered item (including homebrewing it for you and then you throw a fit when you don't like the results), I will not trust you with real power. etc etc
EDIT: I am not looking for DMing advice here, I already do sessions 0, read articles and have dmed and played a lot. I am mostly noting how small shit can tell you if you can rely on/trust somebody for more serious stuff and that TTGs have a lot of small shit coming together at once.
Oh yeah. I mean, there was one guy we had in our dnd group who wanted to like do horrible things to every npc. Like I won't talk about it further because it was honestly disgusting. We never invited him back.
"It's all just pretend and those aren't real people anyway!" excuse enjoyers seem to have quite a bit of overlap with others that hypothesize about how living breathing people are actually NPCs/simulated/not-really-conscious
Had a guy like that who had played a lot of DnD in a group of people still trying to figure everything out and made everyone really uncomfortable.
That's one of many reasons I do a session zero to lay down the law. There are things i will not do or tolerate as a dm and i make it clear at session zero that agreeing to and adhereing to those restrictions is something I ask the players to respect while I'm pputting in the effort dming for them.
A very good idea, especially for new groups or ones with more than one new player. Often if there's just one new player, they fit in or drop out with the rest on their own.
It really helps to get everyone in the same room and talk about what kind of campaign they want to do. Silly? Serious? Lots of politics? Hack and slash dungeon crawls? High magic? Low magic?
Then everyone can starton the same page, knowing what they're getting in to. Experienced and consientious players will be able to shape their characters and goals to fit in with thegroup's expectations, then build from that.
My gaming experience improved so much once I learned about the session zero concept.
I wholeheartedly agree.
It also works as a first line of defense; some especially toxic
types get mad at the concept of a session zero. I'm not kidding; I speak from personal experience. The source of the rage is apparently from their suspicion that the game will be a "safe space/hugbox" and them getting mad about even the idea of people consenting to content helps screen them out that early on. 
My only game as a player I just vibed as an evil warlock who sneaks into the guards Barracks at night and casually murders them while theyre sleeping in their bunks then played around to undermine the feudal aristocracy as an appointed investigator who galvanted around exposing crimes of the kings vassals (or mostly making them up lmao) to cause the lands to fall into civil war.
This was more than a decade ago
I can't stress enough how important it is to have a session zero to come up with a group contract. It's become customary in groups i play in and it saves so much headache.
This goes for organizational things like start times - both of my current online groups include several parents, so we've planned for some wiggle room in regard to start times. We've also gone into things like "microphone discipline" (not talking over others), which is a huge deal in one group because we're six players + GM and bringing it up beforehand has made things a lot more manageable. We've also agreed to set up chat channels where people can just be silly and shoot the shit so it doesn't distract the entire group. We're not exactly running a serious game there, but it's very heavy on drama and character play, so it helps when the beer and pretzels type stuff is a bit seperate.
We've had spread sheets with potential lines and veils (CW-type stuff that either doesn't appear in the game at all or only happens off-screen) so people can make clear in advance that they don't want certain topics like SA, torture, gore, are phobic to a specific type of animal, do not want sex and romance or sillyness in the game or absolutely do want that etc. The spreadsheet format means that nobody has to open up to the entire group about trauma if they don't want to. ofc there are some issues we discuss more openly if need be, for example i'm not the only trans person in both of my groups and the GM in one campaign made sure to see where our boundaries are because the setting is a highly gendered society that also has non-traditional gender roles. Now, you may argue that certain things like not wanting assault and bigottry in your game are self evident, but unfortunately they're not. Having a CW spreadsheet reliably scares off the creepy fedora guys, and i've found that there's always at least one issue that's problematic for somebody that nobody would have expected.
Another huge aspect of this are expectations towards the game mechanics and how to apply them - like how to handle character deaths, if fudging dice rolls is ok or not etc. Resurrection is extremely rare in our setting, so most players don't want a character they're attached to die due to one unlucky dice roll. OTOH we have a character who's a cleric of a duelling goddess with the biggest "bring it on" energy possible and his player's been very open about having no problem with a heroic perma-death of his character. Knowing that in advance instead of going on assumptions what's "normal" and "expected" and "common sense" avoids a huge amount of arguing. Same goes for things like how much to minmax and balance characters, balance between roleplay and rollplay etc. How to handle arguments about rule interpretations should also be a part of this.
Then there's the characters themselves and their interactions. Do any of the PCs know each other from before the campaign? What are their motivations, hopes and fears? Is there certain content that would be cool for the characters to deal with? How does the group want them to interact? Do any of the characters havbe longterm goals and can they become a part of the campaign? Have they already made enemies that could come up as a nemesis? How do we handle that? We also encourage to frequently have breakout sessions were people can have 1:1s in a play by post format. Thanks to this, my bard is now in an extremely cute relationship with the group mage and has a growing rivalry with the nepo baby elven prince who's also in our group. In situations like that, it's important that everybody is on the same page about how to handle drama between the characters, how much PvP is permissibly, whether any lewd stuff is allowed to happen between PCs and how (only in DMs, only in the chat in spoiler tags, etc.) and things like that. OFC if this goes into ERP territory, all players involved should also set boundaries in advance, not to mention that this isn't something that works with every group or every player.
Play styles are so vastly different. You really can't take anything for granted. The best way to deal with this is to take the time and talk about it before the campaign starts.
Beware the player that insists they are "Chaotic Good" and "free spirited" while using that to mean "be a cruel and manipulative asshole and inflict suffering on PCs and NPCs for personal gain, but feel good about it." Even fucking
has babbled at length about how he feels he's the goodest boy and the humblest and that floods of light will wash away his problems with divine blessing like he's Vauthry from FFXIV Shadowbringers.The ideal game to play Trump would be Paranoia, doubly so if you conspired with your GM. Tohave your Trump character get away with everything without consequences while the rest of thre troubleshooters get blammed for treason.
That's what I was getting at: if a character had such euphoric delusions of selfish and destructive "goodness" and the player acknowledges that (and the other players are fine with it) that could be an interesting complication to group composition.
As it was, the player was a giant Randroid and an insufferable douchebag, both at and away from the table.
There's an old saying about how we are who we pretend to be.
I'm not saying that I haven't had players that could portray excellent Lawful Evil characters and I could even trust them to play the character as a guest villain as they got stronger and their schemes came to fruition,
for the most part antisocial behavior against other players is very damning, as is pointless "push at the walls to see if they fall over" assholery against the campaign and its NPCs just to see what happens.In all the decades that I've ran tabletop games, not a single "oh I want to import this suspiciously overpowered character with homebrewed items and abilities" player was a good fit for my table. Not one.
The best evil I can manage is muystache twirling radio drama villains. I re-wrote Cheliax from the pathfinder setting from scratch because it was a stupid-evil nation of badness where everyone worshipped demons even though they'd go right to hell when they died. I made it extremely bureaucratic evil kafka hell, and the high ranking demon worshippers expected they'd be incarnated as immortal demons when they died if they could attract attention from the right functionaries in hell so they at least had some kind of incentive for kicking puppies.
Even the slightest hope of a "fuck you, got mine" afterlife payoff makes evil organizations and evil cults make at least some internal sense.
Look at how megachurches work in the world we live in.
I have a list of things that just do not happen in my campagins, and sa and torture are at the top. Doesn't happen. Not that kind of story. I don't care if it makes the game deep or mature or whatever, gaming is supposed to be an escapist fantasy and my fantasy is not dming for players who want to do war crimes all the time.
I fortunately haven't had to set such rules out on paper in quite some time because I have a mature group (mature as in emotionally and socially developed, not
media consumption as maturity identifier) and it also helped having more women in it than the "old school hardcore" douchebags would feel comfortable with.spoiler
Spoiler: The number of women in a group that douchebags tend to feel comfortable with is zero.
old nasty asshat tabletop gamers
I used to hear them be called "catpiss" because of the stench they brought into hobby stores. I used to think that was unkind, but... it often did apply.
Not always. My very worst player of all time was more a
style superficially clean and tidy sort that kind of wanted to be in the game while being praised for how free spirited his "Chaotic Good" cruelty, torture, and enslavement antics were.
You can fix this by being anxious about being late and showing up 30 minutes to two hours early for everything and just sit in the car until like 5 minutes before so it's not weird (it is still weird if someone saw you there in your car earlier)
While I understand your wrath it is a thing in which normativity and culture intersects with a few other things.
The fiction of being on time is a specific one, there are multiple time concepts (not only monochronic and polychronic). There are plenty of things that for neurodivergents, say with so called "executive function disorder" make it very hard to be on time (they will instead be much too early or late). Etc. etc.
I understand that your play structure is one in which you want to have a fixed time and be able to power through. That is something to establish though. For me playing with plenty of neurodivergent peeps and people from various cultures and backgrounds and individual preferences and work structures I found that just blocking a long time and have social hour in the beginning and end worked well.
If you want to have mono attention on your game (in our group we had people plenty of the time for example scribble stuff or for one of our players having a bit of nap times) that is a decision you can do of course.
effortpost, and I sincerely love it.
